Not Without Its Women

India has a law for every crisis and a scheme for every demographic. It is especially true for this Government, whose Prime Minister was chief minister for 12 years and a passionate proponent of projects, whether it was the Jyotigram scheme for rural electrification or the Vanche Gujarat scheme to improve reading skills. The astute economist Arvind Panagariya attributes this to the overpowering role of the Centre in legislating on subjects in the Central as well as concurrent list of the Constitution. States, he says, have minimal room to determine policies. Smart chief ministers focus on implementation, and in creating social schemes, whether it is Ladli Laxmi Yojna, Shivraj Singh Chouhan's girl child scheme, or Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik's Madhu Babu pension scheme for the old, disabled, widowed and HIV-positive.

So it is with the "women's issue”. The Budget had nothing in it but homilies for women, as did the BJP manifesto. If the UPA government was guilty of knee-jerkism, fast-tracking a law which is already being revised and announcing a Nirbhaya Fund it didn't know what do to with, then the BJP is no better. It thinks a Rs 100-crore Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao scheme, a total of Rs 200 crore on new "safety of women” schemes and a promise to "have a chapter mainstreaming gender in the school curriculum” are enough to appease the "matas” and “behnos”. Given that it is a Government that promises a clean break with the past, it could start by changing the discourse on women. As Madhu Kishwar has pointed out very sensibly, it could start by changing the emphasis on the Women's Reservation Bill and instead put the onus for greater representation of women on political parties, which needs merely an amendment in the Representation of the People Act, 1951. It could also, as Kavita Krishnan argues, make several ground-breaking changes: ensure popular education on women's freedom and autonomy; adequate allocations for shelters for women facing violence; increase the number of judges and courts; take stern action against moral policing/honour crimes by khaps, police, and vigilante saffron groups alike; and create a code of conduct for persons in public life.

But this is tough stuff. It's easier to allocate loose change on showpiece schemes and create a whole new bureaucracy with the Nirbhaya centres. It's easier also to make the Ministry of Women & Child Development marginal both politically and financially. The total spending on women (gender budget) constitutes only 5.4 per cent of the entire Budget in 2014-15, a 0.2 per cent decrease from the last budget of 2013-14. It's more difficult to address uncomfortable issues such as the powerlessness even the most seemingly powerful women feel in public life. As Kiran Pasricha of Ananta Aspen Centre points out, women are key in any nation-building exercise. But unless India recognises the role of women at home, in schools, in public life, it will have only a nominally new consciousness.

It doesn't help that RSS leaders define the importance of women as bearers of tradition in society, central to the survival of social institutions like the family. They do not understand that women are actually harbingers of change, that only if they are liberated can men follow. And only then will India (or Mohan Bhagwat's Bharat) become a global player. Currently, India's dominant image in the eyes of the world traveller at least is of Rapistan. No amount of counter propaganda about the rate of rapes in Western nations will help. And no amount of wishful thinking about India being regarded as a modern global power will make it so without its women. We will remain a tiny power with a major Napoleon Complex.

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